The eight screening programmes and seven installations featured in transmediale 2014 focus on subjects such as the internet, surveillance, and Big Data as well as electronic, digital and analogue trash. The afterglow theme is seen as gloomy visions of the afterlife of images and technologies in which naïve dreams of a digital revolution, free exchange and equal participation no longer have a place.
This programme addresses fears of rejection, marginalisation and loss of identity. | With works from Hearst Metrotone News, Tom Palazzolo & Jeff Kreines, Whitney Johnston, Thomas Haley, Cory Arcangel.
We demand meaning and consistency from the cultural products we consume and this program is designed as a crude rebellion against this comfortable idea that there are objective “standards” of any kind and that we have a right to expect “good taste.” ...
What actually happens to all the pictures we constantly take of ourselves after we’re dead? | With works by Jesse McLean, Karin Fisslthaler, Sergio Oksman, John Smith, Bjørn Melhus, Tasman Richardson
Wasteland Poetries addresses trash as inheritance, the unwanted legacy of our aggressive civilization... | With works from Cordelia Swann, Jean-Luc Vilmouth, Louis Henderson
Constant control of the individual is a vital element of all modern societies. Currently, however, contemporary democracies seem to be shifting fundamentally into new, digitally supported, surveillance states... | With works Krzysztof Kieślowski, Nadav Assor, Andy Weir, Ivar Veermäe, Maha Maamoun, Chris Marker
Digital Plays is playfully and ironically dedicated to the cinematic fiction that so often—and usually unintentionally—ends up in the Trash. | With works by Elizabeth Vander Zaag, Ella Raidel, Ho Tzu Nyen, Neïl Beloufa, Keren Cytter, Beatrice Gibson
Both the films in this programme are a form of recycling from ubiquitous streams of images, in this case from the News... | With works from Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ken Jacobs
Tom Palazzolo, represented in the screening program with the film Ricky and Rocky, has created for the transmediale afterglow a cinematic statement of his outtakes from 1968 and from current material, which can be seen online here.
The viewer roams around desolate flats in a Polish village by way of extended tracking shots. The people look strangely unreal in this mix of photographic portraits and tableaux vivants.
Utopia is a silent double slide projection with 160 handmade slides in two Kodak Carousel magazines. They will be presented as a loop in the Auditorium of the HKW.
Billboard advertising has been severely restricted in Greece since 2010. The naked scaffolds that remain in the wake of the crisis can be found across the country, presenting viewers with empty surfaces.
Data in the Cloud seems to be disembodied. But in reality, it does have a physical manifestation, albeit a small one, on the hard drives on internet servers.
Call of Duty is one of the most successful first-person shooters in computer gaming history. In the Black Ops instalment from 2010, the action takes place in Nuketown, a city in the American desert where the effects of atomic bombs were tested on people, cars and houses. The ‘residents’ of Nuketown are mannequins.
